Washington’s big business agenda is on life support

It may be too early to issue a death certificate to the big business agenda in this Congress. But suffice it to say, its vitals are faint and fading. And its condition took a turn toward critical on Friday evening, when House Republican leadership suffered their latest stunning humiliation.

For those who didn’t spend their Friday rush hour glued to C-SPAN, a recap: the House GOP’s far-right flank revolted against a plan by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to fund the Department of Homeland Security, nearly prompting a shutdown of the anti-terrorism agency. Boehner and his team managed to salvage a last-minute extension, buying leaders another week, but the source of the conservative fringe’s angst remains. That group insists on bundling the department’s funding up with measures that would gut President Obama’s post-election executive order easing deportations of illegal immigrants. Yet the strategy faces a dead-end in a still closely divided Senate, a fact that newly-installed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has spent the last several weeks demonstrating by putting it to a series of votes, only to have Democrats block it each time. Unfortunately for Boehner, his rump faction maintains a surprisingly durable immunity to observable reality. And so the Speaker’s stuck, caught between the imperative to avoid another disastrous (partial) government shutdown and a faction that won’t accept anything less than its own maximalist terms.

How — and whether — this gets resolved this week remain uncertain propositions. But this much is already clear: If Congressional Republicans have this much trouble fulfilling their most basic charge of keeping the government up and running, the corporate lobby shouldn’t hold its breath for complex trade agreements and fundamental overhauls of the tax and immigration codes. Corporate chiefs know this. It’s why the Business Roundtable — the group representing top CEOs in Washington, whose inability to re-center the debate is the subject of a Fortune story in the current issue — has dramatically narrowed its focus to what it calls the four key pillars of growth. And first among equals on that wish list is a return to rational budgeting.

“That was priority number one,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, now one year into a two-year term as the Roundtable’s chairman, told Fortune last month. “If you can at least get some period of time with some stability and regular order in Congress and the administration, then you can begin to tackle issues that really drive economic growth.”

Indeed, Republican leaders built a guarantee they’d clear that admittedly low bar into their fundraising pitches to the business class during the 2014 midterm campaign. Boehner, McConnell and their allies talked up the need to assemble a “governing majority,” buzzwords for margins large and pliant enough to allow them to work their business-friendly will. The GOP’s midterm rout delivered the numbers, giving Boehner the biggest Republican majority in the House since the 1930s while handing McConnell the keys to the Senate. And upon taking power, McConnell made explicit that Republicans would seek to build on the humble ambition, first, not to be “scary.”

Mere weeks later, any grander plans appear to have collapsed along with that one in the dust cloud of Friday’s spectacle. After all, House Republicans just showed they can’t process their own acid reflux over Obama’s immigration order without nearly shuttering a critical federal agency. So the likelihood that group will manage to craft a messy, comprehensive legislative solution to the issue and then rally around it is vanishing, at best. Ditto for tax reform. Even before the meltdown, Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) acknowledged the tax code rewrite he’s charged with guiding through the upper chamber is likely to take longer than two years.

That leaves trade as the last remaining hope for near-term progress on the corporate agenda. And there, again, the Friday debacle spells bad news. The business lobby is ramping up a campaign to convince lawmakers to hand Obama fast-track negotiating authority on trade deals, a piece of leverage free-traders view as key to finalizing work on the massive Pacific Rim pact known as the Trans Pacific Partnership and another with European countries. But 52 House Republicans — fifty-two, 5-2 — just proved their willingness to shame their own leaders in order to register antipathy for Obama’s use of executive authority. So how willing will the same crowd be to voluntarily hand the president a longer leash to hammer out deals with foreign governments? They won’t do it simply because the business elite make the request.

Fresh evidence of that came over the weekend, when a parade of GOP presidential prospects appearing at the right-wing Club for Growth’s winter conference all called for dismantling the Export-Import Bank. That once-sleepy federal agency, long a sidelight in the broader trade debate, has taken on outsize significance as a litmus test for Republican free-market purity; at the confab, even the Republican field’s most prominent moderate, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, added his support to winding down the institution. No wonder, then, that lobbyists closely tracking the trade debate in Congress say they’ll need to round up significant numbers of House Democrats to carry the issue, with varying ranges that average out around 30. And they say that so far, the allied anti-trade forces of labor and environmental groups are winning the early argument back home by raising a ruckus in the districts of fence-sitting Democrats. That fight has yet to start in earnest, but considering the atmosphere, it’s already hanging by a thread.

House sues Obama over health care law

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Alex Rogers, TIME

House Republicans sued the Obama Administration on Friday over how it has implemented the health care reform law, taking legal action after threatening to do so for months.

The House sued the cabinet secretaries for the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of the Treasury, and filed the case in the U.S. District Court for Washington D.C., House Speaker John Boehner’s office said. At issue are administrative tweaks the Administration has made during the course of implementing the law.

“Time after time, the President has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and re-write federal law on his own without a vote of Congress,” Boehner said in a statement. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action.”

The lawsuit went unfiled for months after House Republicans first floated it. Legal experts have been skeptical of its chances of success.

Boehner said in July that the House would sue President Barack Obama for twice delaying the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that businesses with more than 50 full-time employes provide insurance or pay a fee—a provision Republicans oppose anyway. The suit also alleges that the law does not allow the executive branch to transfer funds to insurance companies to reduce out-of-pocket payments for low-income enrollees, as Congress has not appropriated the money for that purpose. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cost-sharing subsidies for low-income Americas—those at two-and-a-half times the poverty level, or $11,670 to $29,175 a year for an individual—will cost $175 billion over the next ten years.

Republicans had trouble finding a lawyer to pursue the case, but Boehner found his man this week in George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley, who had testified in favor of such a lawsuit this summer. House Republican aides have suggested the lawsuit could be expanded to include the Obama’s executive actions taken this week to grant temporary legal status to millions of immigrants in the country illegally, but Turley has said in the past that expanding the lawsuit would weaken it.

House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ridiculed the lawsuit as a political stunt.

“After scouring Washington for months, Republicans have finally found a TV lawyer to file their meritless lawsuit,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement Friday. “While the American people want Congress to get serious about creating good-paying jobs and strengthening the middle class, House Republicans are paying $500-an-hour in taxpayer money to sue the President of the United States. The fact is, this lawsuit is a bald-faced attempt to achieve what Republicans have been unable to achieve through the political process.”

Republicans can’t repeal Obamacare, but they’ll pretend to try

Maybe Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have decided on a good cop/bad cop routine.

A day after McConnell, the incoming Senate Majority Leader, told reporters in Louisville, Kentucky that the midterm voters sent a message to the parties to work together, Boehner, the House Speaker, offered a more aggressive interpretation. “My job is to listen to the American people,” the Ohio Republican told reporters gathered Thursday in the Capitol for his first post-election press conference. “The American people have made it clear they’re not for Obamacare. Ask all those Democrats who lost their elections Tuesday night.”

Exit polls revealed a dour electorate, with 78 percent worried about the direction of the economy and 70 percent reporting their own financial situation is the same or worse than it was two years ago. It should be no surprise, then, that they ranked the economy their top concern, 20 points ahead of health care. On President Obama’s signature law itself, they were divided, with 46 percent saying it was about right or didn’t go far enough and 49 percent declaring it an overreach. Another election night poll found nearly six in ten voters said their vote was not intended to send a message about the law.

Then there’s the matter of who actually voted. One estimate is pegging turnout at 37 percent of eligible voters, the lowest participation rate since 1942. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for either side.

Distilling the will of a fragmented, partial electorate is tricky work and there may be no right answer. But there are certainly some wrong answers, and Boehner struck on one. He knows it. This is the same guy who declared the measure “the law of the land” in the days after the 2012 election. But he leads a Republican majority that owes its margin to lawmakers bent, Sisyphus-like, on continuing to push wholesale repeal, no matter the practical impossibility of achieving it as long as a Democrat sits in the Oval Office and the GOP lacks the numbers in Congress to override a veto.

And that’s what’s really going on here: McConnell and Boehner are each doing a balancing act. The divergent natures of their chambers dictate different approaches to the same problem. In the House, where a bare majority rules, Boehner’s firmer grip on his gavel will license a more strident tack — and the continued strength of his right flank will demand it. McConnell will still need to peel off a handful of Democratic votes to move most business, hence the more conciliatory tone. But the longer-run political imperative is the same for both: They need to pivot as quickly as possible to items that can actually get signed into law, so that they have something to show the restive, angry electorate when they face them again in two years. Those likely include changes to Obamacare — there is broad, bipartisan support for repealing the medical device tax, for example. The most serious threat to the law looms at the Supreme Court, which agreed Friday to hear a challenge to the federal subsidies that help make the new insurance coverage affordable.

Meanwhile, McConnell and Boehner will need to make a show of trying to rip the law out “root and branch,” as the incoming Senate leader liked to say on the Kentucky campaign trail. For help staging the repeal kabuki, they might want to study the recent history of the opposition.

Democratic leaders faced their own version of the same conundrum when they retook control of both the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms. After twelve years in the minority, they rode back to power in part by harnessing liberal disgust with the Iraq war. That election sent a clearer message than this one, with exit polls at the time revealing 56 percent of voters disapproved of the war and 55 percent favored withdrawing some or all of the troops. And yet, with a 51-seat majority in the Senate, Democrats had little hope of forcing the hand of President Bush, who was resolute about prosecuting his surge strategy.

“We had to follow through and try to force action despite the fact that it was difficult to imagine getting the votes,” says Jim Manley, at the time an aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “It’s a release valve.”

Democrats tried to force a timeline for troop withdrawals onto funding for the Iraq war. Bush repeatedly pledged to veto it. At the end of their first year in power, with lawmakers anxious to quit the capital for Christmas, Democrats folded and approved the war money with no strings attached. Liberals fumed — “this was the time of MoveOn,” says Manley — and Democratic approval ratings dropped to 32 percent, below Bush’s own marks. Congressional Democrats turned on each other, directing recriminations at their colleagues in the other chamber. But by then, the squabbling in the Capitol was already being drowned out by a presidential contest rumbling into gear. The four Democratic Senators angling for their party’s nomination — Obama and Hillary Clinton, included — didn’t even bother coming back to Washington to cast votes. And less than a year later, Democrats rode Obama’s movement candidacy to major gains in both the House and Senate.

Republican election victory: Don’t expect much change

Wall Street shouldn’t expect any big changes now that the Republicans are in control of both houses of Congress.

The Democrats still remain very much in play as they can easily filibuster bills in the Senate or veto them at the executive level. This means issues that are particularly near and dear to Democrats and President Obama, such as healthcare and financial reform (Obamacare and Dodd-Frank), aren’t going anywhere. It also means that any sort of “radical agenda” proposed, promoted, or promised by Republicans in either the Senate or the House is likely to be DOA come January.

But while big changes are out, the Republicans may be able to secure some small changes that could have an impact on a number of key sectors of the economy; namely, energy, finance, and defense. How this all unfolds depends much on the strength of the Republican leadership and its desire to actually get something done, outside of Washington theatrics. This means approaching President Obama with respect, while silencing the self-serving enfants terribles of their party, such as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). In other words, it won’t be easy.

On Tuesday, the Republicans trounced their Democratic opponents in a number of key Senate races to take control of both houses of Congress for the first time in over a decade. But while the Republicans will try to sell the victory as some sort of affirmation of their conservative agenda, the truth is a bit more nuanced.

For example, the Republicans benefitted from a demographic shift in the Senate this election cycle, as several senior Democrats retired from states that were at one time considered to be “blue” states when they first entered office decades ago but which have since turned bright red. This explains the big Republican victories in states like Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia and, to a certain extent, Arkansas. The other major Democratic losses can be attributed to it being a midterm election which, in general, favors Republicans, as they normally fail to attract mainstream, urban, young, women, and minority voters, who normally vote Democrat.

But no matter how it happened, the Republicans will control both houses of Congress come January, like it or not. The question now is, what are they going to do with this new power?

Well, Republicans are supposed to be conservative in nature, so that means they should be defenders of the status quo. Nevertheless, the ideal of what it means to be a Republican has grown ever so vague, especially in the last decade. With the rise of the fringe Tea Party movement, Republicans look as radical as the most liberal Democrat, albeit on the opposite side of the spectrum.

That being said, it’s hard to decipher exactly what the “Republican Agenda” will be come January and what it could mean for the economy and Wall Street. The campaigns this year were heavy on the partisan rhetoric but light on the issues. Repealing Obamacare and rolling back financial reform were two big issues mentioned by Republicans in stump speeches around the country, but with the Democrats still able to comfortably filibuster bills and the President armed with veto power, neither will happen, at least not in the next two years.

The best road map the Republicans have given the public so far comes in the form of a speech given by John Boehner (R-OH), the House Majority leader, to the American Enterprise Institute in September, where he laid out his vision of what he hoped to accomplish after the elections were over. A great deal of his speech focused on the energy industry and its importance to the economy. He wants to make it easier for drillers to access public lands and wants Congress to finally approve the Keystone Pipeline, which would bring Canadian crude down to Texas so it can be refined or shipped out. But Boehner doesn’t stop there. He believes that the energy boom presents a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset our economic foundation from the bottom up.”

Boehner has listed five major changes needed to keep the boom going, which coincides nicely with traditional Republican values, but would probably do nothing to keep the Shale Revolution going, especially with oil prices now below $80 a barrel. They include tax reform, changing the corporate tax code and the repatriation of foreign earnings; austerity, balancing the budget and cutting entitlement programs; legal reform, curbing excessive litigation; regulatory reform (rolling back Dodd-Frank); and education.

Austerity is probably the most dangerous to Wall Street and the economy at this point. If Republicans cut spending to levels needed to balance the budget without raising taxes, economic growth would stall. While the much-dreaded sequester cut federal spending across the board, it didn’t cause the economy to fall back into a recession when it came into force earlier this year. It did, however, shave a few points off this year’s growth rate.

With the presidential elections just two years away, it is highly unlikely that the Republicans would risk derailing the U.S. economy to fulfill some ridiculous notion of balancing the budget, especially with the U.S. able to borrow money for next to nothing. If anything, the U.S. should be borrowing as much as it can before rates start to go up.

Tea Party members among the Republican majority will shriek for austerity, but the leadership won’t let it happen. Meanwhile, the Democrats won’t let legal reform through, given that trial lawyers are one of their major allies and benefit greatly from the current legal system. Any reform that would see caps put on litigation would be better off done at the state level, anyway.

As for reforming the tax code, things could get interesting. The last major change to the corporate tax code was in 1986. Back then, the government was also divided, except that Congress was controlled by the Democrats and the White House was occupied by a conservative Republican. If Republicans and Democrats somehow pass corporate tax reform, it could have a major impact on how companies report their earnings and invest their cash. Those cash-rich companies with lots of foreign earnings stashed abroad, such as Apple, may find it unnecessary to sell public debt and could repatriate billions of dollars back to the U.S. The money could filter through the economy, giving a healthy pop to the economic growth rate. It could also be great news for shareholders, as companies may choose to use the cash to buy back stock or issue fat dividends.

As for rolling back Dodd-Frank, there is little Congress can do to successfully legislate the 849-page bill out of existence. Instead, financial reform will continue to be fought at the rule-making level, with Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists battling it out with the SEC, the Fed, and the CFTC in court, all while wheeling and dealing in back rooms.

Congress could blackmail the CFTC or SEC to delay implementation of certain laws by withholding funding, but that can only go so far. For instance, the Federal Reserve, is self-financed and is not subject to the congressional budgetary process. But they could make life hard for Fed Chair Janet Yellen by hauling her up for hearings and questioning her every move. It could also threaten to resurrect bills that call for the Fed to be “audited,” which would probably be Yellen’s biggest nightmare.

Education is the last big pillar in Boehner’s speech, and it is probably the most vague. Education is handled mostly at the state level, so Congress has little power to reform the nation’s school system even if it wanted to. Congress could offer states large block grants to be put toward education, but that would mean spending money, which would go against balancing the budget.

Despite Boehner’s best intentions and a relatively moderate and reasonable wish list, it would honestly be a miracle if he was able to get anything done in the next two years. It is hard enough for him to gather the necessary votes he needs in his own party to get something to pass, so getting Democrats to follow him as well looks like a tall order, especially with presidential elections only two years away. That probably explains why Boehner’s speech didn’t really promise to do anything concrete—even he’s not sure he can deliver.

But there is one glimmer of hope. Throughout the speech, Boehner didn’t utter the word Obamacare once and dodged questions about healthcare. Maybe he is sending a message that he is finally willing to accept Obamacare and move one? If that’s the case, change may indeed be afoot.

Republicans humiliated Obama, now they need to humble themselves

Republicans just handed President Obama an unequivocal humiliation, routing his party in midterm contests spanning the map. As a result, they now find themselves on dangerous ground.

The narrative of the GOP’s outsize rout is fast drying in cement. So the question turns to the newly-empowered party’s mandate: Do they have one? If so, for what?

The GOP establishment brains responsible for engineering the party’s gains already are urging humility. Their mantra today: “This is not a mandate, it’s an opportunity.” Congressional Republican leadership hewed to the message as the scale of their victory became clear last night. House Speaker John Boehner, in a statement, said Republicans are “humbled by the responsibility” and will skip celebrating in favor of getting to work. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who romped over his own challenge back home in Kentucky from a young, energetic Democrat, struck a peacemaking note in his victory speech: “We do have an obligation to work together on issues where we agree,” he said. “Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict.”

That might sound bizarre from a figure widely understood to be the architect of Republicans’ programmatic opposition to Obama. But the numbers behind the GOP gains tell part of the story: Voter interest in the election was the lowest of the last six midterms; those who did show up registered equally dismal feelings about Obama and Republican leaders, with nearly 6 in 10 describing themselves as dissatisfied or angry with both; and broadly, Republicans actually rated below Democrats in voter approval, with 40% reporting a positive view of the GOP, compared to 44% for the president’s party.

The numbers on Capitol Hill tell the rest of the tale. Yes, Boehner expanded his grip on the House to at least 242 seats, on track to piling up the largest Republican majority in that chamber since the Truman administration — a margin that should make Boehner’s job easier. But the real action for the next two years was always going to be in the Senate, where the 60-vote threshold for accomplishing most of anything will force McConnell to go hunting for Democratic votes. He’ll need even more — 67 — to overcome a veto pen Obama has so far only wielded twice in his presidency but will likely use more frequently in the remainder of his second term. Given those hurdles, the difference between a 51-seat majority and a 53 or 54-seat one seems almost academic.

And so the duty for Republicans becomes two-fold: Managing expectations about what they’re able to get done given the real checks that remain on their power, and then actually delivering some accomplishments to show they’re equal to the responsibility of governing. The strategists and moneymen who coauthored the Republican victory are already working to communicate that message to the victors.

“It’s first and foremost a rebuke to President Obama and his policies, but it’s also a reality check and a second chance for Republicans,” says Steven Law, a former McConnell aide now running American Crossroads, the Karl Rove-affiliated super PAC that spent nearly $22 million helping elect Republicans. And Law, notably, is counseling caution. “Republicans need to keep in mind this election wasn’t primarily about them… The voters are going to expect Republicans to put good, practical solutions on the president’s desk.”

That means no more debt-ceiling brinkmanship when the country faces the next deadline to lift its borrowing authority in March. And, relatedly, no more pressing a dead-end bid for a wholesale repeal of Obama’s health care law. On the contrary, there is a list of business-friendly, smaller-bore agenda items Republicans can dust off in hopes of striking compromises with the White House — on trade deals, energy projects, and patent reform. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), captain of last year’s disastrous government shutdown gambit, missed or ignored that memo in the run up to Election Day, insisting he’d press his party to double down on confrontation. By Tuesday night, he looked like a churlish caucus of one when he appeared on CNN and refused to say whether he’d support McConnell’s ascension to majority leader (just moments after the current titleholder, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, placed a call to McConnell, conceding).

But if Cruz is dealing himself out of the work of governing, it only highlights McConnell’s burden. After all, the Kentucky Republican now stands poised to realize his career ambition of leading the Senate after flawlessly executing a long game built on denying Obama any Republican cooperation. The strategy both stoked and was reinforced by the Tea Party uprising on the right — a movement that ended up turning on the party, complicating McConnell’s project of capturing Senate control. This year, McConnell’s path to victory required him to stamp out the last of the rebellion’s brushfires and then train the focus back on the President. In both cases, it meant defining Republicans according to what they aren’t. The work of finally filling in those blanks awaits, and it will not be easy.

Boehner to Business: Help Me Stiff-Arm the Nuts

Back on May 20, the National Republican Congressional Committee — the House Republicans’ campaign arm — announced it was launching a “Drive to 245,” a Babe Ruthian exercise in shot calling that implied the party would net an additional 11 seats in the November midterms.

Twenty-five days out from the elections, that remains an uncertain proposition. Republicans are sure to pad their majority, though gains in the single digits look more likely. As Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who runs the NRCC, tells Fortune, “It is attainable, but it’s a pretty high goal.”

But the Republican boast was never really meant to nail the balloting results. Instead, it was a clever blend of hype and hope served up to major donors about what could follow the election: For GOP benefactors in New York, Washington and beyond who’re past tired of self-destructive antics by Republicans reactionaries, the party tailored the push to conjure the dream of a reinvigorated Speaker John Boehner. Given the room, he could stiff-arm the tiny, troublesome right flank that nearly pitched the country into a debt default three years ago and generally made major headaches out of otherwise simple chores. One Republican operative spells out the subtext of the pitch to the corporate pragmatists the GOP is hitting up for campaign cash: “We want to give Boehner a governable majority so the crazies you hate will be irrelevant.”

Republican leaders can’t call elected representatives on their own team “crazies,” but they can make a broader case. “Growing the majority means we’ve got a bigger pool to draw from to go do the work of the country,” Walden says. The need to build a “governing majority” is his refrain when he makes the sale to rooms full of business leaders he’s asking to contribute. In case that point was lost on any of the Republican rank-and-file, party leadership has helpfully printed it on a palm card for them to refer back to before conversations with major donors, with the phrase spelled out in all caps for emphasis: “We MUST expand our majority to 245 seats — giving us a 55 seat GOVERNING MAJORITY and building a firewall for 2016, regardless of who the presidential nominees are,” the cheat sheet reads.

To the credit of the party — and allies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove-affiliated American Crossroads — Republicans are fielding recruits across the map handpicked to help Boehner do just that. In Michigan, Dave Trott, an entrepreneur and major Republican donor himself, mounted a successful primary challenge to Kerry Bentivolio, a Tea Party-endorsed incumbent who once pledged to hold a hearing on the chemtrails conspiracy theory. In Arkansas, after two failed attempts, Republicans finally lured French Hill — a banker and onetime advisor to George H.W. Bush (beat those Establishment credentials) — into the running for a swing seat north of Little Rock. In Arizona, back in late August, the NRCC and its allies notched another win when Andy Tobin — speaker of the state house, endorsed by Mitt Romney — won a nip-and-tuck primary against a couple of bomb-throwers for the right to challenge a popular Democratic incumbent.

Many of these contenders have been forged by and reflect what appears to be a growing popular disgust with Congressional dysfunction.

The field still has its share of, ahem, colorful characters. For every seat Republicans hope to pick up in a swing district, there’s a reliably red one in which a retiring incumbent is primed to be replaced by a candidate with incendiary views. The hope for leadership is that substituting kooks for other kooks won’t alter the dynamic in the conference — and that whatever rightward nudge those freshmen effect will be more than reversed by the infusion of a new generation of problem-solvers. That is, for every Ryan Zinke, a Montanan who called Hillary Clinton “the Antichrist,” there’s a David Young, an Iowan who’s affect is even flatter than his state. In one of his TV spots, Young explains, “In Van Meter where I’m from, when there’s a problem, we sit at the table, share a pot of coffee, hear each other out and find a solution. That’s what Congress needs.” That, and with Young in the debate, maybe some refills on the coffee.

But as far as its fundraising focus goes, the Drive to 245 so far has left House Republicans majorly outgunned by the Democratic minority. Through August, the House Democratic campaign arm had outraised the NRCC by $33 million, with Democrats more than doubling the Republican haul in that month alone. Walden chalks that up to a pair of advantages Democrats can exploit. While he’s “flying coach on United,” Democrats are deploying “Air Force 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5,” — meaning President Obama, the first lady, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and Hillary, the odds-on Democratic presidential frontrunner. “Our biggest fundraiser is John Boehner. After that, it’s me and [House Majority Leader] Kevin McCarthy. We’re not exactly household names.” Plus, he says, Democrats continue to benefit from a mastery of online fundraising that Republicans can’t yet come close to matching.

Republicans are outpacing Democrats when it comes to dollars wrung from corporate political action committees by nearly two-to-one, according to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics. But Senate Republicans are vacuuming up most of those dollars in their bid to retake control of the upper chamber. Compared to the high drama of that contest, it’s tough to get donors excited about whether Republicans pick up six seats or ten in the House. Nicholas Taubman — a former CEO of Advanced Auto Parts and a major Republican donor with ties to Eric Cantor, the ousted House Majority Leader — puts the Senate focus succinctly: “That’s where the money’s going, and that’s where you need to concentrate.”

How Republican gains translate into a governing mandate — and the will to summon it — is a different question. It’s also, of course, the only one that matters. Last month, as Congress raced to finish its work before quitting Washington for the campaign trail, Boehner appeared strengthened in a way that would have been tough to imagine during the government shutdown just a year ago. He quietly gathered majorities for funding the government, extending the charter of the Export-Import Bank — a Tea Party bête noire — and handing President Obama expanded authority to wage war on ISIS.

Business has its list of priorities for Congress to tackle, from revamps of our tax and immigration laws to trade agreements and a long-stalled patent reform bill. Dan Meyer — chief of staff to then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, now a lobbyist with the Duberstein Group — says newer Republican lawmakers he talks to register frustration that they haven’t done much legislating since coming to Washington. “I think there’d be an attitude to try to get some things done,” he says. “I don’t want to oversell it. But giving Boehner another dozen seats to work with would be helpful.”

Congress fails the long-term unemployed, once again

On Saturday, the prospects of America’s long-term unemployed will look even dimmer than they do today.

May 31 will mark the expiration of the measure to renew emergency unemployment compensation from January through June that the Senate passed with bipartisan support early last month. The House has left the legislation for dead ever since.

The importance of the date is more symbolic than technical: The House could still hold a vote and pass the legislation after Saturday, making all of its benefits retroactive. (Regardless, the long-term unemployed will again be without a safety net come Sunday.) More notable is the House’s staunch, almost indifferent inaction on the bill and the issue’s dwindling political relevancy.

Will long-term unemployment insurance get another chance?

House Speaker John Boehner’s answer to that question: Not anytime soon. “The speaker laid out the criteria for considering another extension in December,” Michael Steel, spokesman for Boehner said on Thursday. The speaker and other House Republicans wanted the bill to include a plan for the creation of private-sector jobs. “The ball is in the Administration’s court and it hasn’t come up with a plan to meet our requirements.”

And as the unemployment rate continues to improve, breaking the gridlock on long-term jobless benefits will become even less of a political priority. During recessions, Congress grants the long-term unemployed extra weeks of federally funded benefits that go beyond the 26 weeks of compensation that states supply. So, as the unemployment rate continues to drop — it was 6.7% in December when the long-term benefits expired and stood at 6.3% last month — the case for renewing long-term jobless benefits becomes harder to make. When unemployment hit a five-year low of 7% in November, Speaker Boehner said that the positive report “should discourage calls for more emergency government ‘stimulus.’”

But advocates for the long-term unemployed say there’s still an urgent need for government assistance. In April, nearly 3.5 million Americans had been unemployed for more than 27 weeks — that amounts to 35% of all jobless Americans. That rate is down from a peak of 45.5% in April 2010, but it is still a near-record high. And people who have been out of work for that long face even tougher odds of finding jobs again. Someone unemployed for eight months has a job application callback rate of 4%, compared to the 7% rate of someone who’s been jobless for one month.

“There’s this fissure in the labor market between people who can and do find jobs rather quickly after a layoff and those who don’t,” Mitchell Hirsch of the National Employment Law Project told Fortune. “The longer they struggle to find work, the tougher it is to convince employers to consider them for a job.”

Extending benefits to the long-term unemployed would increase these Americans’ spending on consumer goods and services, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which examined the consequences of extending these benefits in December. As a result of such an increased demand for goods and services, businesses would boost production and hire more workers. That, in turn, would increase inflation-adjusted GDP by 0.2% and increase full-time equivalent employment by 200,000 people by the fourth quarter of 2014, the CBO found.

Extending unemployment benefits comes with a potential downside, the CBO warned. Recipients might not search as hard for a new job. But last week, FiveThirtyEight reported that cutting off benefits doesn’t necessarily encourage these unemployed workers to get moving: “The end of extended benefits hasn’t spurred the unemployed back to work; if anything, it has pushed them out of the labor force altogether.”

Congressional Democrats could always tack the extension of long-term unemployment benefits onto what Republicans would consider a must-pass measure, such as funding for the nation’s transportation projects, which is up for renewal in July. No matter what happens from Saturday on, May 31 is important, Hirsch says, because the House had the chance to help the long-term unemployed for the preceding five months “and chose not to.”